About Us

About the Artist

Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan and has trained in traditional Japanese calligraphy since the age of six, devoting her life to Japanese caligraphy art. In 1989, she was awarded the rank of Shihan, or Master, by two of Japan's most prestigious calligraphic societies. Master Takase is among the few to have won several “best of” category awards in national competitions throughout Japan, with her work having been displayed in the Osaka Museum of Arts. To view Master Takase's award winning art, please visit Traditional Japanese Calligraphy.

Since 1995, Master Takase has been living and working in the United States. Her art has sold all over the world as custom art, for commercial products, in books, magazines, and film. Her style of Japanese calligraphy has been described as refined and cultured among calligraphy artists. After a lifetime of studying traditional calligraphy, Master Takase has devoted herself to adapting the art of Japanese Calligraphy to new mediums and methods. The results are simply breathtaking as you can see for yourself.

Interviews with Master Takase:

Hara: Master Calligrapher Eri Takase on the Art and Energy of Japanese Calligraphy

 

Shop at StockKanji.com with Confidence

A Reputation You Can Trust

In creating this website and in offering these designs for sale, we are asking you to trust us in many ways. Here, we would like to tell you what we have done to earn your trust.

First off, we have been in business since 1995 with our flagship and informational website Takase.com. Also, Eri Takase has been published in dozens of books and magazine articles, and you have probably seen her designs in marketing campaigns, in computer games, movies, or perhaps, on a product at the grocery store. She is well respected in the industry and has been for more than a decade. Even with all this, we wanted to talk about what we do so that you will be comfortable in trusting us with your business.

Translations You Can Trust

One concern that we have aggressively address is the accuracy of our kanji character translations. While we want you to trust our translations, we recognize that most people that do not know Japanese will want to be extra cautious. We have gone to great lengths to make sure that each translation is absolutely correct, including the use of native Japanese and English bilingual translators, but we did not stop there. On each page is a link to one or more additional references, including links to independent dictionaries and, when appropriate, Wikipedia articles. This means that with a click of the mouse you can check the translations for yourself against completely independent sources.

If you still have concerns or questions, you are always welcome to Contact Us directly. We want you to be as happy with the translation as you are with the beauty of Master Takase's art.

Standard Name Translations

Names in Japanese is a huge part of this website and is something we are especially proud of. For those not familiar with Japanese, there tends to be some confusion and we have gone to great lengths to explain the different methods we use, and to use only standard translations.

There are four ways to translate names to Japanese, (see How to Write Names in Japanese), but only the phonetic translation to katakana is standard. This is the translation method that is used in dictionaries and encyclopedias and the way your name would be written on your bank statement in Japan. For this reason, we have focused on a phonetic translation to katakana, and to a lesser degree, in hiragana on this website.

In creating your unique kanji translation, we have done several things that no other website or resource has done:

First, we show the pronunciation that we use for the name. This is often a problem on websites, as names can have several different pronunciations. For example, the name Jan can be pronounced either JAN or YAHN. Each would be rendered differently in Japanese. We make sure it is absolutely clear which pronunciation is being translated.

Second, we have cross-referenced translations with the databases from three different sources, including a popular movie database, a news source database, and a celebrity magazine database. We show, when available, famous individuals that use the exact same translation that we use on the site.

Third, there are cases where a name can have several possible translations. This does not mean that any are wrong, it just means they are different. In these cases, we do searches on frequency of use so that we list the more commonly used version.

Finally, while we have hundreds of names in our catalog, we also offer Special Order Names in Japanese so you can order any first name that is not in the catalog. We can have the kanji character name to you, usually within a single business day.

If you have any questions or suggestions for additions to our catalog, you are always welcome to Contact Us. As we said before, we want you to be as happy with our translations as you are with the beauty of Master Takase's art.

 
You have an error in your SQL syntax
1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MariaDB server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1

SELECT symbol_right FROM currencies WHERE currencies_id =

Filename: /templates/creator/header.php
Line: 26